JOHN SMART

FORESIGHT SPEAKER, CONSULTANT, AUTHOR

John Smart is a global futurist, foresight consultant, and entrepreneur. He is CEO of Foresight University (Ann Arbor, MI and Los Gatos, CA), a foresight training consultancy. He is also founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit focused on understanding and describing human adaptiveness in a world of accelerating technological change.

John’s expertise is in foresight development. His mission is to help leaders, entrepreneurs, and teams to develop best-in-class foresight process, master the Eight Skills of Foresight and Action, and achieve more adaptive futures for themselves, their teams, and their organizations.

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For a list of these and other key foresight books, see The Foresight Guide, 2016.

 

How Can John Help You?

Good futurists (foresight speakers) present important and potentially relevant ideas, trends, data, and questions about the changing competitive environment to your stakeholders, in a way that entertains, inspires, and generates robust discussion and better strategy, plans, and actions. I’ve been a full-time futurist since 2000, and have delivered keynotes to hundreds of satisfied audiences.

Good foresighters (foresight professionals) help your team improve strategic discussions about the future, elicit and map diverse and relevant opinions, uncover implicit assumptions and key disagreements, find better data, models, drivers, trends, constraints, and weak signals to reduce uncertainty, and generate improved forecasts, scenarios, real options, and plans. Above all they should help you identify, benchmark and strengthen your current foresight process and culture, so that stakeholders can get better at identifying and reaching preferred futures. I’ve developed undergraduate and graduate courses in foresight, and I consult in foresight process and culture for dozens of leaders and their organizations.

Futurists and foresighters may not know more than you about the long-term future, especially in your subspecialty. But the better ones are constantly learning, teaching, and consulting about global and industry trends, innovations, and strategic responses to change, and can help you and your team see and adapt ahead of your competitors. In a world of accelerating technological change, good foresight process and culture are incredibly valuable to every leader and organization. Let’s talk and see if I can bring value to your audience and your team.

John's Bio

John Smart is CEO of Foresight U (Ann Arbor, MI and Los Gatos, CA), a foresight learning and development organization, and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit studying adaptiveness under conditions of accelerating technological change. He is also founder of FERN, the Foresight Education and Research Network, creating curriculum for the 22 MS/PhD programs globally that offer strategic foresight degrees.

Before launching ASF John spent nine years as an educational and software entrepreneur, co-founding and building Hyperlearning, an educational services company sold to The Princeton Review in 1996. He is a lecturer on leadership and technological change at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA), an advisor in foresight and forecasting at Singularity University (Mountain View, CA), and a technical advisor to NextIT (Spokane, WA), a leader in intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) platforms. John has authored several next-gen IT foresight studies, including the Metaverse Roadmap, the Conversational Interface and Open Internet TV. His new book, The Foresight Guide: Being a Leader in Anticipating, Creating and Managing the Future, is free online now and debuts on Amazon in 2018.

As a scholar, John is co-founder of the Evo Devo Universe research community, an international community researching evolutionary and developmental processes of change, and a member of the ECCO research group at VUB (Brussels, Belgium). 

John has a BS in business administration from UC Berkeley, an MS in futures studies from the University of Houston, a BS-equivalency in biology from UC San Diego, an MS-equivalency in physiology and medicine (two years of medical school and the USMLE-I) from UC San Diego School of Medicine, and has done postbaccalaureate studies in biological, cognitive, computer, and physical sciences at UC San Diego, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He studied living systems theory at UCSD under the mentorship of James Grier Miller (Living Systems, 1978), who mentored under process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Dr. Miller encouraged John to pursue multi-scale studies in technological, economic, and social change from a complex adaptive systems perspective.

John’s twitter account is @johnmsmart. He blogs at Medium and Substack on foresight and leadership.

When You’re Ready to Get Serious about the Future

Foresight Speaking & Keynotes

Speaking Topics

John speaks to the C-suite, to strategy, policy, R&D and HR teams, to university students and the public on a range of industry and organizational foresight topics. He does presentations and runs seminars (Q&A sessions) and workshops (small group breakouts and report backs) on three main themes:

1. Foresight Development 

  • Universal Foresight (Preparing for Accelerating Change)
  • Personal Foresight (Personal Visioning and Strategic Planning)
  • Global Foresight (Societal and Sci-Tech Trends and Scenarios)
  • Organizational Foresight (Methods and Models)

2. Adaptive Management and Leadership

  • The Do Loop: Eight Skills for Adaptive Foresight
  • The Five Goals and Ten Values: Adaptive Leadership
  • Lessons for Leaders: Profiting from Accelerating Change
  • Foresight Culture: Predicting, Creating, and Managing the Future

3. Global Technology Futures

  • Natural Intelligence (Deep Learning)
  • Natural Security (Societal and Technological Immune Systems)
  • Ten Areas of Technology Change
  • Personal Sims (Smart Agents, Groupnets, Valuecosm)
  • Mediated Reality (AR, VR, Lifelogs, iTV)

Specialty industry and organizational foresight topics are available on request.

What People Say About John

  • I first met John when he ran the original Accelerating Change Conference in 2003. It was one of the most eye-opening conference experiences I have had, before or since. John has the ability to take future studies out of academia and present them in a way that makes them tangible to the rest of us.

    Terry Frazier
    Terry Frazier Competitive and Market Analyst | Competitive Strategist
  • John has extraordinary gifts. He is foundational to a critical grassroots movement growing in the U.S. His diligent will, coupled with an unyielding passion that defies sensibility, makes him a remarkable basin of attraction for talent. He illuminates intensely what's now possible in life.

    Tyler Emerson
    Tyler Emerson Executive Producer at New Organ
  • John combines deep insights and intellectual rigor to explore what are essentially human concerns relative to accelerating technological change. He has the ability to foster constructive conversations among individuals with very different world views in a way that advances shared understanding and a mutual exploration of viewpoints.

    Sean Murphy
    Sean Murphy BeamWise, Inc., SKMurphy, Inc.

The Foresight Guide & Other Works

Reviews of The Foresight Guide

  • This book is far more than a comprehensive directory of resources - it is a digital gateway to the emerging discipline of Foresight.

    James H. Lee
    James H. Lee Founder, StratFI
  • One part encyclopedia, one part text, one part self-help, one part editorial, and one part call to action. The field of foresight seems much bigger now than it did before reading this, and my professional reading list is now on a super-exponential curve!

    Carrie Anne Zapka
    Carrie Anne Zapka Microbiologist, GOJO Industries, Inc.
  • "A wonderful resource for aspiring futurists as well as anybody just interested in learning about foresight. An information packed book that should be in any intro class to Foresight. A comprehensive Foresight 101 book that both professionals and aspirational futurists will enjoy!"  

    Anne Boysen
    Anne Boysen AfterTheMillennials.com
  • “John Smart has gathered by far the best collection of vital information illuminating foresight strategies and futures thinking. This outstanding resource links readers to literally thousands of ideas, approaches, organizations and individuals in the futures field. It is required reading for 21st century thinkers.”

    Janna Quitney Anderson
    Janna Quitney Anderson Elon/Pew
  • A marvelous compendium of knowledge. At a time when the future itself is in doubt, this Guide should prove a boon to policy-makers in business and government, teachers and students of all ages, and everybody really, as the need is universal. Read this book because it is important, but also because it offers a delightful wealth of fascinating ideas.

    William E. Halal
    William E. Halal George Washington University, Bangkok University, and TechCast Global.
  • “Very inspiring and complete book for everybody who is interested in foresight. John writes with passion for our field.”  

    Kaat Exterbille
    Kaat Exterbille Managing Director, Strategic Foresight, Kate Thomas & Kleyn Future Management Consultancy
  • John Smart and his team have compiled an encyclopedic resource for anyone interested in anticipating, creating and managing the future. The Foresight Guide is the first book anywhere that addresses a complete range of readers interested in the foresight field, including students, educators, and organizational leaders. It is a remarkably complete source for our times.

    Pamela Douglas
    Pamela Douglas Author, Future of Television, 2015
  • What a work! It is all in here; this is the book to read to understand and overlook the entire field of foresight.

    Pero Micic
    Pero Micic Founder, FutureManagementGroup AG

Corporate Foresight Consulting

Adaptive Foresight: The Do Loop

Which of these four steps and eight skills are personal strengths? Team strengths? Which need improvement?

Are you measuring and improving each of these skills on your team?

(Feel free to mouse over this graphic for details).

LEARN >

Learning

History and Status

SEE >

Anticipation

Probability Foresight

Innovation

Possibility Foresight

Strategy

Preference Foresight

DO >

Execution

Getting Somewhere

Influence

Recruiting Others

Relating

Sustaining Your Team

REVIEW >

Reviewing

Staying On Target

John's Consulting Domains:

Adaptive Foresight Development (Eight Skills)
Branding and Marketing Research
Change Management and Leadership
Data Acquisition and Analytics
Design Thinking and Gamestorming
Digital Competitiveness
Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship
Forecasting and Modeling
Foresight Process and Culture
Ideation and Innovation Management
Intelligence, Security and Risk Management
Personal and Team Foresight
Technology Assessment and Scouting
Scenario Planning and Learning
Strategy, Analysis and Planning
U/X and Usability Studies
Wargaming and Simulations

CONTACT

For speaking inquiries and date reservations, feel free to contact John directly. You may also contact John’s agent,

Alvis Brigis

PHONE

John: 650-468-4462 m

Alvis: 323-898-6277 m

EMAIL

John Smart
johnsmart@gmail.com

Alvis Brigis
alvisbrigis@gmail.com

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